10/05/2009

Madness Monday: Moses Pengry

About a week ago, I stumbled upon an pdf copy of a paper that had the English origins of Moses and Aaron Pengry of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The paper is by Warren Skidmore and is available here. The paper is ostensibly about the identity of Mary, the wife of Thomas French of Ipswich. Although the author does not make it apparent, he includes the Pengry information to bolster his argument that someone from Gloucester, England would be in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The argument is not made per se and, in fact, doesn't make sense. Mary, the wife of Thomas French was in New England by 1632 in order to marry and have their first child baptized in Boston on 23 Sept. 1632 (all of this is in the Great Migration Begins I:705). The article, however, shows that Isabel (Bower) Redverne was still in England with her husband until he died in 1636 and the Pengrys don't show up in Ipswich until 1640. In any case, this paper did make huge genealogical suppositions without much evidence or footnotes. It did give two very important wills with cites. Both are from PCC and I ordered them and read them. The first, John Bower, gent. dated 11 Dec. 1619 and proved 5 Aug 1620 mentions his daughter Bridget, Mary Webley, daughter of my daughter Alice, wife Bridget, son Thomas and "Bridget Pengry, daughter of John Pengry." no specific relationship. So, too, the will of Henry Redven (sic) gives bequests to Thomas and Moses Pengry without any specific relationship. He does mention his wife Isabel and his brother-in-law Anthony Bower.
These are all solid clues and I wanted to run with it. I mentioned it to a friend, another genealogist, who said, "I remember this, we turned down that article for the Register [The New England Historical & Genealogical Register]. He said make sure they didn't publish it anywhere else. OK. I searched PERSI. Nothing. I then searched the LDS catalog and sure enough, there it was, both in print and on microfilm, so I've ordered a copy. I then searched google books and found it (in all places) in a family newsletter called The Shapley Connection. Don't ask me why. But it's there. Volume 5 (1992): 91-99. Luckily the NEHGS library had it, and I now have a copy. This version has no footnotes. At all. It also makes huge genealogical suppositions. Don't get me wrong, I think the essence is correct, but it's a diamond in the rough.
Tangentially, the thrust is that Moses Pengry is the son of John Pengry and Catherine Bower, she the daughter of John Bower and Bridget Bridg(e)mann. The last couple appears in the 1623 Visitation of Gloucester as well as the article, “The Bridgmans of Gloucester, England” by Shirley Garton Straney, The Genealogist 17 (2003):189-208. Paradoxically that article was also turned down by the Register since it didn't have a U.S. tie in. But how is anyone writing in the time up to 2003 going to find a Pengry/Bridgemann tie in, written in a family newsletter in 1992? Go figure.
So, now, what to do? How do you write a [real] article when there are bits and pieces in at least three different places already in print? You certainly can't claim [cue the John Brandon music] that you are discovering the English origins of Moses Pengry. The best you can say is you are cleaning up the English origins of Moses Pengry.
BTW, in the Shapley article, it mentions a noncupative will of John Pengrye, mentioning his son Moses. No footnote. And they just spent two paragraphs talking about how the family moves between Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. So, it's not in PCC, so I have several other jurisdictions to search for this [possibly] existent will.